Description:

• Herbs, mainly perennial, undershrubs, or shrubs, erect, ascending or decumbent to scrambling
• Leaves usually pinnately 3-foliolate, occasionally digitately 3-foliolate, rarely 1- or 5-foliolate; stipules often striate
• Flowers commonly purple, mauve or pink and hyaline, rarely red, in terminal or occasionally subaxillary racemes or panicles, rarely flowers clustered or solitary or in shortly peduncled, axillary racemes, bracteate
• Calyx usually broadly campanulate to shortly tubular; lobes longer than tube, 2 upper lobes ± connate, 3 lower acute or subulate-acuminate
• Petals: vexillum sometimes clawed; wings ± united with keel; keel nearly straight to incurved
• Stamens mostly diadelphous rarely monadelphous; anthers uniform, basifixed
• Ovary sessile or stalked, 2-many-ovuled, sometimes hairy; style inflexed or incurved, with terminal stigma
• Pod exserted from calyx, constricted into membranous or coriaceous, flat or rarely turgid segments which separate on maturity
• Seeds compressed, often flat, transversely broadly elliptic, ovate or reniform
• x = 11 (aneuploids)

Nomenclature:

• Desmodium Desv.
  • Desvaux: 122, t. 5 (1813) name conserved
  • Harvey: 227 (1862)
  • Schrire: 12 (1988)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 300, cosmopolitan in tropical and subtropical regions, with centres of diversity in E Asia, Mexico and Brazil
• Southern Africa: Species 10, Namibia, Botswana, the four northern provinces, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape